Unbalanced mini

First, the mini part. Apple Mini to be more specific. Here's a little article giving a sneak peak at some of Apple's plans for making their compy the center piece of your living room's technology.

Now, onto the unbalanced part. Surprisingly, this is a gaming post. Been awhile on one of those I think, because I've been writing a lot rather than gaming. Despite that, I've been spending a lot of time reading other gaming blogs and forums about GMing, game development, and just gaming in general. Most of the time, the info and opinions is solid, but here's a bit of a crutch I'm noticing.

Sometimes, developers and GMs will put a bad rule in place to support some other disparate element of bad design. The most common implementation is in the form of extra feats that support the flavor. Personally, I love feats, but I think forcing players to burn feats for some flavor reason is just bad.

The best example for this is the ill-fated Windriders campaign I ran. The only character recommendation in that campaign was that the characters be capable of joining the Windrider prestige class. That required the Mounted Combat feat. Of the four characters that requirement was applicable to, I think two took the feat. Only one actually took levels in Windrider. One was effective on hippogriff, but didn't take the feat, and one character was flat-out inappropriate for the campaign as described to the players and as implemented when I was DMing. Now, make that, or something similar a REQUIREMENT for playing in a campaign, and you'll get even more resentment, if not outright rebellion from the players.

The only real way to make a feat requirement a viable option for a setting is to make the setting so extreme that natives have developed the feat as an evolutionary means of survival, then provide it as a bonus feat to natives. That gives players the illusion of choice during character development of playing a race/sub-species that has the advantage built in, but isn't quite a distinctively new race, or playing a standard, non-native character that is at a decided disadvantage in the realm of mundane survival, but is more "normal" outside of that setting. Why is it an illusion of choice? Well, it's like being in rural America and being given the choice of getting $5 American or 5 sterling pounds. Outisde of BFE, the pounds are a better way to go because of better exchange rates and accessiblility to the extra money, but in Podunk, IN, you'll be hard pressed to exchange it to US dollars, leaving you at a disadvantage.